Digital Movie Remastering – Flicker

I’ve been bombarded with questions today asking me about remastering of movies shot digitally. There are several issues when delivering a movie shot in digital to the consumer whether using DVD, Blu-ray or OTT streaming. These issues become greatly amplified when you start moving into the Ultra HD realm, especially with the various color space issues and HDR formats. With the consumer TV market HDR and UHD are not standard. Color space can be DCI-P3 or REC2020. HDR standards include HDR-10, DolbyVision, HLG and variations that TV manufacturers are implementing. Even within a single manufacturer you have sets that can generate different levels of brightness in HDR. You can have sets that max out at 500nits and others at 1,000 nits. When viewing video on the different levels of color and brightness you end up having a different threshold for the Flicker Fusion where the movement causes a visual flicker. On lower end panels this is much more noticable than higher end panels. It becomes really obvious when videos shot digitally at 50/60 fps is played back on sets that don’t support the higher frame rate and have to stepped down to 25/30 fps.

When preparing videos and movies to be streamed OTT you can improve the user experience substantially by creating different masters for various platforms from mobile phones to the highest end HDR Ultra HD television.

As we prepare for the next generation of 4K Ultra HD content updates to the UltraFlix network we find ourselves amidst another format war. Remember when there was Beta and VHS. Beta was better and VHS still won out. We appear to be on the brink of a similar battle for the next generation of 4K TVs. While DolbyVision has superior color gamut (rec 2020 versus DCI P3) and is spec’d to a maximum of 10,000 nits versus 4,000 in HDR10, it currently appears that HDR10 is winning out with the TV manufacturers. One of the biggest issues on the content side is that you still have to go through Dolby to get your color work done, which can be a hindrance. Fortunately we’ve always started with a 16 bit color HDR master for everything we work on, so as it’s brought down through the process, and finally delivered over the internet to your TV it’s source material can always be revisited as the 4K Ultra HD space matures.

With HDR tv’s now becoming standard fare in the consumer space, remastering everything we have into HDR capable is the next task for the studio team. Exciting times as the home movie experience is now surpassing that of the movie theaters in terms of quality visuals.